Biz & IT —

Google News Archive indexes 200 years of content

While Google's News Archive Search may help people "explore history as it …

Google has just launched another project in its bid to rule the world organize the world's information. The Google News Archive Search allows users to find news accounts up to 200 years old from selected sources, and while that sounds incredible, the service isn't yet a compelling tool.

You can think of the new search in one of two ways: a more specialized version of a regular Google search, or a much broader version of a Google News search. Queries to the News Archive search magazines, newspapers, and some Web-only publications for content, and can return results in a standard format or a new "timeline" view that makes it easy to follow the progression of a story over time. Searches can be limited by date if you want only early 20th-century coverage of the Titanic sinking, for instance. Just as we've come to expect from Google, searches are fast, the interface is clean—and Google has no current plans to make any money from the project.

While this sounds like a fantastic resource, it has one substantial limitation: many (if not most) of the older articles cost money. Archived articles from papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are only available to users who pay a fee. In the sample searches that we ran at the site, most pre-1990 results came from pay sites (though much interesting content from Time and from the UK's Guardian newspaper was available for free).

In essence, this makes Google into a news database frontend of the kind that students and academics have used for years to track down articles. Since Google does not provide any sort of payment system of its own, however, users who want to view the results will have to set up accounts and make payments at several different sites. While this is no deterrent to someone pursuing serious research, it's likely to put off the average Web surfer, who in most cases could just go to her local library or college and access more complete information from proprietary databases, usually at no direct cost (your tax dollars at work).

Still, the site is intriguing for the promise that it holds. Few of the academic databases mentioned above are used outside of the library, and few have the potential that Google does to integrate disparate kinds of information. What other database can you go to in order to search for text in magazines, newspapers from around the world, out-of-print books (with complete text available for viewing), in-print books (with limited snippets available), and the Web?

The obvious question here is what might happen to the burgeoning academic database market if Google starts handling payments and makes it simple for users to apply their credit to any type of search material? The many databases that provide access to newspapers and magazine archives would immediately feel the pinch, and users would probably have no objection to using Google's clean interface and excellent results to further their own work, if the price was right (Google could sell unlimited access to universities, libraries, and other institutions, much as databases do now). That would leave only the databases which index academic journals, and you can bet that Google has already turned its collective brainpower to the challenge.